/*
 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE.
 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal"
 * <code>Document</code> object. It is very common to want to be able to
 * extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a
 * document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a
 * document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object which
 * can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for this
 * purpose. While it is true that a <code>Document</code> object could fulfill
 * this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a heavyweight
 * object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for
 * this is a very lightweight object. <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an
 * object. <p>Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as
 * children of another <code>Node</code> -- may take
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> objects as arguments; this results in all the
 * child nodes of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child
 * list of this node. <p>The children of a <code>DocumentFragment</code> node
 * are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the
 * structure of the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> nodes do not need
 * to be well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules
 * imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top
 * nodes). For example, a <code>DocumentFragment</code> might have only one
 * child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a
 * structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML
 * document. <p>When a <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a
 * <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other <code>Node</code> that may
 * take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and not
 * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the
 * <code>Node</code>. This makes the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very
 * useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the
 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that the
 * user can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code> interface,
 * such as <code>insertBefore</code> and <code>appendChild</code>. <p>See
 * also the <a
 * href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document
 * Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface DocumentFragment extends Node
{
}
